What does Lie Beyond The Stars?

19 Nov What does Lie Beyond The Stars?

I’ve always liked treasure hunts—solving riddles, cracking codes, deciphering symbols, learning the etymology of words. I even like those damn click-bait posts about the secret meaning of corporate logos.

But none of these mental puzzles compare to the feeling I get when I discover there is a hidden meaning in a story I’m reading.

Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend about the story of Adam and Eve. Though I was not raised religiously, I attended a Catholic high school, which supplied me with a decent amount of contempt for organized religion. During the conversation with my, much wiser, friend, I made a self-righteous statement about how only ignorant people could believe in fairy tales like Adam and Eve, to which my friend replied, “Well, you do know there is a hidden meaning to that story, right?”

“Hidden meaning?” I said confused.

“Of course. Like most sacred texts, there is the literal meaning, but there is also the esoteric meaning hidden between the words for those clever enough to find it.” My friend went on to explain a completely different way of looking at Adam and Eve and their “garden of Eden”, and ka-pow!, my mind was blown.

From that point on, I became quite obsessed with digging for hidden meaning in books—from religious texts, to fairy tales, to Greece and Roman myths, to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, to Dante, and on to even more obscure esoteric writings.

Often, the hidden meaning of a story is given through simple metaphors and allegories, so after reading it for a while you say to yourself—“Okay, I get it, the pigs are the communist revolutionaries and the farmer is the Tsar.” However, other times the meaning is more abstract, more illusive, buried so deep down that it’s impossible to, as the saying aptly goes, wrap your mind around it.

It is in this tradition of layered-writing that I set out to bury a few tasty treasures in my own book, What Lies Beyond the Stars, for those readers so inclined to “dig” for them.

There isn’t any value (nor any fun) if I point out exactly where these treasures are hidden and what they all mean. In fact, the more you struggle to “see” them for yourself, the more meaningful those treasures will become to you.

Yet for those who want a little help with your search, I set out some suggestions below (scroll way down) of where to start.

Good luck, and don’t forget your shovel.

– Michael Goorjian

Two sides of the butterfly

Fog

Cold-water shocks

Lucid Larry

The sinkhole and buried treasure, and digging through the center of the earth